Bij veel organisaties staat innoveren met ict hoog op de agenda voor komend jaar. Voor ict-innovaties zijn vaak substantiële bedragen gereserveerd in de begroting. Tegelijkertijd geven diezelfde organisaties aan te worstelen met innovaties. In veel gevallen ontbreken de processen en randvoorwaarden om innovatie daadwerkelijk te realiseren. Dit blijkt uit resultaten van de ict-besturingsscan van adviesbureau Berenschot. Die is door ruim honderd organisaties ingevuld.

Circa 70 procent van de organisaties geeft aan dat er een apart budget is gereserveerd voor innovatie en de meerderheid daarvan stelt ook dat dit budget voldoende is. Tegelijkertijd geeft het overgrote merendeel van de ondervraagde organisaties aan dat het onduidelijk is hoe het budget toegekend wordt aan de verschillende initiatieven en dat het binnen de organisatie ontbreekt aan een echt innovatief klimaat.

Fouten maken
‘Het reserveren van een apart budget is een essentieel onderdeel voor het stimuleren van innovatie, maar om daadwerkelijk toegevoegde waarde te kunnen bieden is veel meer nodig’, zegt Linda van Rens, adviseur bij Berenschot. ‘Organisaties moeten hun ogen en oren gericht hebben op de buitenwereld om de nieuwe mogelijkheden die ict biedt, te signaleren, en vooral ook om deze te vertalen naar mogelijkheden voor de eigen organisatie. Daarbij is nauwe samenwerking tussen ict en business cruciaal. Bovendien moet er ruimte zijn om te experimenteren. Fouten maken hoort daar ook bij.’
De uitslagen van de ict-besturingsscan laten zien dat steeds meer organisaties het belang van ict-gedreven innovaties onderkennen. Bij vrijwel alle organisaties zijn er medewerkers die zich bezig houden met het identificeren van nieuwe ontwikkelingen op het gebied van ict. Waar het vaak aan schort is het vertalen van deze ontwikkelingen naar concrete kansen voor de eigen organisatie.

Mogelijkheden blijven onbenut
‘Dan blijft het bij de introductie van een iPad of tablet voor generieke toepassingen zoals het lezen van e-mail’, vervolgt Van Rens. ‘De mogelijkheden om met diezelfde tablet de manier van werken echt te veranderen blijven onbenut. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan het beschikbaar stellen van applicaties die gebruikt worden in het primaire proces aan een vertegenwoordiger of controleur op werkbezoek zodat hij realtime kan communiceren met de backoffice.’
Wil je als organisatie ict-innovaties met echte impact invoeren, zorg dan voor goede samenwerking tussen ict en business bij het identificeren en verzilveren van kansen, aldus Van Rens. ‘Nog te vaak is het de verantwoordelijkheid van alleen de ict-afdeling om alert te zijn op mogelijkheden om nieuwe ict in te zetten binnen de eigen organisatie. Waardevolle kansen voor echte innovatie van de manier van werken blijven dan onderbenut. Ook het risico dat voorgenomen innovaties niet van de grond komen neemt toe.’ Ruim de helft van de organisaties geeft dan ook aan dat de meeste ict-innovaties nooit in gebruik worden genomen.

Te weinig aandacht
Van Rens: ‘Organisaties zijn op de goede weg door het belang van innovatie met ict te onderkennen. Dat er voldoende budget voor innovatie wordt gereserveerd is, zeker in deze tijd, veelzeggend. Tegelijkertijd realiseren veel organisaties zich onvoldoende dat budget alleen niet voldoende is. Wil innovatie echt succesvol zijn, dan moet een organisatie de organisatorische aspecten, juiste randvoorwaarden en processen creëren om innovatie te bewerkstelligen. Op dit moment gaat daar vaak nog te weinig aandacht naar uit.’

Door Sander Hulsman
Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/nieuws/management/4704446/2379250/innovatie-met-ict-blijkt-in-praktijk-vaak-lastig.html#ixzz2Q4QkLyjE

Clouds get real when the Facebook kids sit in the big chair
By Jack Clark in San Francisco

Major adoption of public cloud computing services by large companies won't happen until the current crop of IT workers are replaced by kiddies who grew up with Facebook, Instagram, and other cloud-centric services – so says Rackspace CTO John Engates. Should we be worried?

"10 to 15 years ago no one would put their credit card on the internet either – it takes time to soak in this stuff," Engates told The Reg.

He believes the misgivings that some people feel about putting their data in distant multi-tenant bit barns comes from a lifetime spent maintaining and fiddling with servers and a deep distrust of companies offering to do it for them.

"I just think it's a time thing," Engates says. "Those guys that are the older guys in IT will retire and the new guys that are the Facebook generation or the Instagram generation will become the new guys, and they will have only lived in the cloud era."

This statement somewhat glosses over the fact that many people are employed in organizations to run data centers, and a sudden keenness on cloud by the bosses can cause admins to have visions of pink slips arriving on their desks.

"To some degree there is a generational issue. However, it's also true that it's about how you believe you're valued by your org. If you feel that building something makes you more valuable, then you're less likely to want someone else to do it," Mark Thiele, executive vice president of data center tech at Switch, told The Reg via email.

But though IT workers can use their experience and knowledge to counsel their bosses against moving to the cloud, things get tricky when new hires are cloud cultists.

The rub is that young IT devs will have grown up with cloud-oriented ways of developing code and interacting with businesses, so remotely hosted as-a-service technologies will be their default way of solving many technical problems, Engates says.

This is already happening: the majority of startups this hack speaks to are enthusiastic users of public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, because it means they don't need to make any capital expenditures, nor take time away from developing their applications to maintain infrastructure.

"We're totally in the cloud + a little colo for 24/7 testing," Bradford Stephens, chief executive of database startup Drawn to Scale told The Reg via email. "We have large Linux development desktops for 'virtual clusters', but that's it."

"I'm sure there's a generational bias when it comes to using the cloud... I think grizzled IT folks don't trust anything they can't hit the reset button on," he said*.

Rackspace expects the same attitude in its young employees, Engates says:

The next 18-year-old guy that we hire to be a developer here will have never experienced the client/server era, he will have only lived in the 'ability to spin up a server on the cloud era' – and why would he think twice about building a datacenter? He hosts his code on github, he lives in the public cloud, he lives in a Facebook world, and he just would not have a second thought about doing it that way – the trend is we will go in that direction.
Not understanding the ins and outs of data center infrastructure can come back to hurt companies – unsophisticated startup Rap Genius suffered from poor application performance for two years because its developers put all their trust in the Heroku platform-as-a-service they sat upon, and didn't run basic tests.

It also opens companies up to an unhealthy dependance on their service provider, so when Amazon or Google or Microsoft have a data center brownout, thousands of businesses that depend on their services can be knocked offline. Only the largest cloud-users can avoid going down, as Netflix has done in the past, and for many startups failure becomes a way of life.

But for all its faults, Engates believes use of the cloud will keep on growing, because young developers find its technologies irresistible, and get hooked on a diet of always available services, delivered from a homogeneous mass of IT equipment.

"Developers want to use tools that make their life easy and allow them to go fast," he says.

This Reg hack thinks that humanity's great capacity for laziness is also going to put pressure on organizations to adopt the cloud, because it will be all their devs can know – why bother learning about chaining together data center infrastructure when packaging up someone else's technology can earn you $30m, as Nick D'Aloisio of Summly found.

Unless regulation mandates you to develop on-site datacenter expertise, what incentive is there for a business to plough resources into building its own technical capabilities? And what happens if you build a datacenter at the top of your demand curve – as Zynga has done with its hugely expensive "Z-Cloud" – leaving you with unused IT assets and a whopping facilities bill? Pink slips all round, we imagine.

If all the money is flowing to startups built on top of cloud systems, then what incentive is there for a young developer to learn how to physically maintain a fleet of servers?

Could this not be part of a real transition in technology, rather than a fashion craze? Much of the technology industry is barreling down a path that sees major OEMs plough money into the research and development of low-cost commodity datacenter hardware, and software tools for managing it all are coming to the fore. The rise of technologies such as OpenStack and the huge investment companies see in software-defined networking all point to a future in which power lies with the ability to manipulate software-based infrastructure control planes, and knowledge of actual hardware loses its value.

Perhaps cloud-skeptics are on the wrong side of history, and organizations that have a no-cloud policy are destined to die out – excluding those where regulation mandates it, of course.

But what of the holdouts who try to stop their organizations' data leaking onto the cloud? What about the engineers within companies who think maybe it's not a good idea to get hooked on the cloud, due to the loss of autonomy it gives a company (and the lack of control) – what about them?

"The conservative people, the people that are less likely to go to cloud – they'll just get run over," Engates says. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/29/cloud_will_eat_our_children/

According to TechTarget's recent Cloud Pulse survey, just 30% of respondents reported using hybrid cloud. This did not surprise me. Most enterprises are just getting started with cloud computing. Building a hybrid cloud is fairly complex and sophisticated work, and it uses technology that's really just emerging. This begs the question: Is the hybrid cloud real?

It's true, enterprise IT has hybrid cloud computing on its radar. The hybrid cloud model provides the best of both private and public worlds. It combines the economies and efficiencies of public cloud computing with the security and control of private cloud. However, marrying public and private cloud services requires advanced thinking and some handy technology.

Four approaches to hybrid cloud computing are emerging:

Static placement refers to architectures in which the location of applications, services and data is tightly bound to private or public clouds.
Assisted replication refers to architectures in which some applications, services and data can be replicated from private to public clouds -- or vice versa.
Auto migration refers to the code or entire virtual machines (VMs) that move between private and public cloud instances, usually through human intervention, but sometimes through an automated process.
Dynamic migration refers to moving VM instances between private and public clouds, as if both the public clouds and private clouds existed in the same virtual OS.
Auto migration and dynamic migration would be the preferred approaches, considering enterprises are moving processes and data between private and public cloud instances by dragging a mouse. Or at least that's how cloud vendor demos depict it.

But this technology is still emerging and experimental. Typically, hybrid cloud technology is called hybrid cloud operating systems; it surrounds both private cloud and public cloud computing resources, and it manages processing as well as the relocation of processing. VMware, Microsoft and HP all have versions of this, as do a few startups.

The most popular approach used today is static placement. Most private and public cloud computing service providers have little or no automation between them. Therefore, deploying an application or loading data onto a cloud means that data will likely stay there until you move it.

Most static-placement hybrid clouds use public and cloud computing instances that are API- or standards-compatible. For example, Eucalyptus is a private cloud version of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that leverages the same group of APIs. In addition, Infrastructure as a Service public and private clouds exist within the same standards ecosystems, such as OpenStack and Citrix's CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

The downside of a static placement architecture is that it's a chore to make private and public clouds work together to form the hybrid cloud model. That "chore" includes coding to the APIs or the public cloud from the private clouds, or to the private cloud from the public cloud.

While you get the benefits of a hybrid cloud -- on-premises security with the ability to scale to public cloud on-demand -- this usually requires additional work. Moreover, once your data or application services exist on a particular cloud, they're typically there for the duration. It's impractical to move assets between private and public clouds because of the work required.

So, yes, the hybrid cloud is indeed real. It's just that the amount of work required to get a hybrid cloud configured and operational can seem monumental because of the maturity of the technology.

The ability to automatically migrate between private and public clouds is the promise, but that technology is emerging and comes with some tradeoffs. Perhaps this is why we don't see much hybrid cloud computing -- but we do see the promise.

Contributor:
David (Dave) S. Linthicum is the CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, an internationally recognized industry expert and thought leader, and the author and co-author of 13 books on computing, including the best-selling Enterprise Application Integration. Dave keynotes at many leading technology conferences on cloud computing, SOA, enterprise application integration and enterprise architecture.

His latest book is Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, a Step-by-Step Guide. Dave's industry experience includes tenures as CTO and CEO of several successful software companies and upper-level management positions in Fortune 100 companies. In addition, he was an associate professor of computer science for eight years and continues to lecture at major technical colleges and universities, including the University of Virginia, Arizona State University and the University of Wisconsin.

Google wil Chromebooks gaan uitrusten met touchscreens. Daarmee gaat het internetbedrijf de concurrentie aan met Windows 8.

Chromebooks zijn laptops die draaien op besturingssysteem Chrome OS van Google.
Volgens bronnen van de Amerikaanse zakenkrant the Wall Street Journal zullen de eerste Chromebooks met touchscreens 'later dit jaar' in de winkels liggen. De nieuwe apparaten zouden ontwikkeld worden onder de naam Chrome Pixel.

Welke fabrikanten de apparaten gaan maken en wat ze moeten gaan kosten is onbekend. De prijs van de huidige Chromebooks is bijzonder laag, maar touchscreens zijn relatief duur.
Chromebooks werken zoals gezegd op Chrome OS, vernoemd naar de browser van Google. Alle programma's werken dan ook in Chrome en hebben een internetverbinding nodig. Niets wordt meer lokaal opgeslagen.

Acer en Samsung verkopen modellen vanaf zo'n 200 euro. Volgens the Wall Street Journal zijn er in het vierde kwartaal van 2012 in de Verenigde Staten zo'n 100.000 exemplaren verkocht. Door touchscreens te gaan verwerken in Chromebooks gaat Google de concurrentie aan met Microsoft. De softwaremaker stimuleert laptops met touch sinds de lancering van Windows 8, dat speciaal voor touchscreens gemaakt is. Opmerkelijk is dat Acer eerder bekendmaakte dat de vraag naar Windows 8-pc's tegenvalt en dat de Chromebooks het beter doen. Volgens onderzoeksbureau NPD was een kwart van de Windows 8-laptops die in januari verkocht werden uitgerust met een touchscreen.

Door: NU.nl/Colin van Hoek